Fridays are a traditional day to devote time in prayer to meditating on the Passion of our Lord. Especially since it is Lent, for the coming weeks Integrity will offer some reflections on the sufferings of Jesus Christ during the final hours before His Crucifixion.
Why meditate on the Lord's Passion? Well, for starters most saints of the Church had a devotion to the Lord's Passion. If your goal is Heaven, copying this pious practice of the saints can't hurt. But I take my cue from a great lay saint, Sir Thomas More, and his extraordinary meditation, The Sadness of Christ:
"For though everything written by all the apostles was dictated throughout one and the same spirit of Christ, still I find it hard to recall any of His other deeds which He took such particular pains to preserve in the memories of men. To be sure, He told His apostles about His intense sadness, so that they might be able to hand it down from Him to posterity. But the words of His prayer to His Father they could hardly have heard even if they had been awake (since the nearest of them were a stone's throw away), and even if they had been present when it happened, they still could not have heard because they were asleep. Certainly they would have been even less able, at that time of night, to make out when He knelt down or when He threw Himself face forward on the ground. As for those drops of blood which flowed like sweat from His whole body, even if they had later clearly seen the stain left on the ground, I think they would have drawn almost any number of conclusions without guessing the right one, since it was an unprecedented phenomenon for anyone to sweat blood.
Yet in the ensuing time before His death it seems unlikely that He spoke of these things either to His mother or to the apostles, unless one is willing to believe that He told the apostles the whole story of His agony when He left off praying and came back to them -- that is, while they were either still sleeping or barely awake and quite drowsy -- or else that He told them at the very time when the troops were at hand. The remaining alternative, then, and the one that seems most likely to be true, is that after He rose from the dead and there could no longer be any doubt that He was God, His most loving mother and beloved disciples heard from His own most holy lips this detailed account, point by point, of His human suffering, the knowledge of which would benefit both them and (through them) others who would come after them, and which no one could have recounted except Christ Himself. Therefore, to those whose hearts are troubled, meditation since it was for this very purpose -- to console the afflicted -- that our Savior in His kindness made known His own affliction which no one else knew or could have known."
If you accept St. Thomas More's hypothesis, then meditating on the Passion is important because the Lord intended to teach us many things through His Passion, so much so that he took pains to pass on knowledge of details only known to Him.
Now there is much more to gather from that passage from The Sadness of Christ but I will leave that task to you. Instead, I thought I would introduce another concept from St. Thomas More's reflection.
I think one of the great challenges we face as Christians is trying to get our minds around what it means that Christ was fully man and fully God. Being one of the great mysteries of the faith, we will never fully understand it. Nonetheless, we ought to try, because it is easy to drift too far in one direction or the other: focusing on Jesus's humanity at the cost of His divinity and vice versa. When it comes to the Lord's Passion, I think we can have a tendency to lose sight of Jesus's divine nature in the midst of His immense sufferings. But there are moments where Jesus's divinity burst through the drama of the Passion, reminding all of the greater story within the Passion. Returning to St. Thomas More:
"For so the Gospel says, 'And then Jesus, knowing everything that was to happen to happen to Him, went forward and said to them, ' Whom do you seek?' They replied to Him, 'Jesus of Nazareth.' Jesus said to them, 'I am He.' Now Judas, who betrayed Him, was also standing with them. When, therefore, He said to them, 'I am He,' they drew back and fell to the ground.'
....
Here Christ proved that He truly is the Word of God which pierces more sharply than any two-edged sword. Thus a lightning bolt is said to be of such a nature that it liquefies a sword without damaging its sheath. Certainly the mere voice of Christ, without damaging their bodies, so melted their souls that it deprived them of the strength to hold up their limbs."
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